The Webkit Open Source Project

The next presentation that we had in the subject Case Studies II was given by Carlos García Campos, that he gave a speech about GNOME, where he collaborate with the community, but he is working in the company Igalia and from the beginning started on the Webkit team.

What is Webkit?

Webkit is a web content engine, started within Apple in 2001 as a fork of KHTML and KJS, mainly used on the web browser Konkeror of KDE. It was not released as FLOSS until 2005.

Carlos indicated that it is curious to think of Apple as a company that does not produce open source but it is not, and Webkit is an example.

It has evolved very quickly, because in 2007, added support for HTML5 and Webkit JavaScriptCore that is, coming from KJS, is rewritten to be a bytecode interpreter called SquirrelFish in 2008, to make it faster.

It is very important knows that Webkit itself is not a browser, but a platform therefore can not be compare with web browsers like Firefox or Google Chrome, because some use this platforms below.

Main objetives

Web Content Engine: using standards-based technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the DOM.

Carlos told us that in Webkit architecture the application is out and there are a layer called Webkit, there two thing that are called Webkit, all the layers and the first layer.

WebKit: API layer.

WebCore: Rendering, layout, network, multimedia, a11y, etc.

JavaScriptCore: JavaScript engine, WTF(WebKit Templating Framework).

Platform: hooks to implement generic operations for every platform.

But Webkit don’t exists like an application, but needs a platform API (called port) to use the Webkit rendering motor. The most relevant ports are:

Apple Mac

Apple Windows

Chromium

GTK+

Qt

Cairo-based Windows

EFL

Windows CE

Some numbers of Webkit

Total Source: 1.203.452

Total Websites: 154.324

Total Tools: 147.490

Total commits: 26.621 – reviewed: 17.673 (66.38%)

Commits per day (avg): 73

Commits per month (avg): 2.217

Bugs closed: 16.947

More than 350 contributors (45 not committers)

In my opinion, this presentation was very interesting not only because it allowed me to know Webkit (I didn’t know completely nothing about it) but because it reveals the importance of this platform in the software world in general, not only for FLOSS. As we have seen Webkit is used in many applications and different systems.

Another fact that I have found very interesting is that the origin of Webkit was Apple, which is not highly regarded in the FLOSS world, yet Apple had been able to release Webkit for the benefit of large number of projects. It is curiously appreciate that much advertising is false and there are many big companies involved in some way with the FLOSS.

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